Robert Olen Butler

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT ROBERT OLEN BUTLER - PAGE 2

By Reviewed by Michael Dorris, an author whose novel ``A Yellow Raft in Blue Water`` will be published in May | March 8, 1987

Wabash By Robert Olen Butler Knopf, 186 pages, $15.95 The year is 1932 and the season is summer, but it's not so much the heat as the humidity that permeates Robert Olen Butler's fifth novel. The air is thick in the Wabash Steel Mill where Jeremy Cole works, and it is heavy in the town of the same name where his wife, Deborah, struggles to make sense out of family feuds and personal tragedy. A depression of weather mirrors that of the economy, and the characters in this short, powerful and disturbingly flawed book are in constant search of a cool breeze, of some indication that better days lie ahead.

By Robin Hemley. Robin Hemley's "The 19th Jew" won first prize in the 1996 Nelson Algren Short Stories Competition | November 17, 1996

Tabloid Dreams By Robert Olen Butler Henry Holt, 203 pages, $22.50 The premise of "Tabloid Dreams" might have seemed enough to a lesser writer than Robert Olen Butler, and we would have been treated to a dozen clever little set pieces full of facile wit and little more. In this new collection of stories, Butler has taken a ham's material and fashioned it into a dozen artful and wondrous tales, once again proving himself to be the rarest kind of writer, one who can't be pigeonholed, who doesn't rely on a set, safe shtick but keeps challenging himself with new and varied material.

By Reviewed by Joyce R. Slater, A writer who reviews frequently for the Tribune | March 18, 1994

Bondage By Patti Davis Simon & Schuster, 224 pages, $23 During his stint as president, we marveled at Ronald Reagan's youthful appearance. Most of our wonderment focused on his glossy brown hair, hair he swore never had a brush with Grecian Formula. I haven't seen "The Gipper" lately. But if his hair isn't snow white by now, it will be if he reads almost any page of his rebellious daughter's latest novel. "Bondage," Patti Davis' fifth book, is an unsavory sexual stew: "Spicy" doesn't begin to describe it. Davis, whose previous literary efforts ("A House of Secrets," "Homefront")

The Dossier, by Pierre Salinger and Leonard Gross (Signet, $3.95). You might think that after serving as John F. Kennedy's press secretary and as European correspondent for ABC News, Pierre Salinger wouldn`t need fantasies. But here he is, cleverly disguised as Andre Kohl, bureau chief of a U.S. television network, suddenly caught up in a complex news story involving ex-Nazis, Communists, the CIA, the KGB and the French and Israel intelligence services, which begins with rumors that one of the most respected world leaders is a former Nazi collaborator.

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, by Robert Olen Butler (Penguin, $10). Lake Charles, La., is at a cultural crossroads. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, numerous Vietnamese immigrants settled there, drawn by a climate similar to that of their lost nation. "The community they form in the new world gives the 15 stories of Butler's collection a sort of novelistic unity, enhanced by his sharp insight into their ways, their beliefs and their reactions to life among strangers in a strange land," reviewer Madison Smartt Bell wrote in the Tribune last year.

Had a Good Time By Robert Olen Butler Grove, 268 pages, $23 Eight years ago, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler ("A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain") brought out a collection of thematically connected stories, "Tabloid Dreams," that took their inspiration from tabloid-newspaper headlines. These uniquely American fantasies (sample titles: "Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover," "Boy Born With Tattoo of Elvis," "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot") came off a little as if Italo Calvino or Gabriel Garcia Marquez had hung out at one of the strip-mall limbos that surround the average American town and tapped into the wildest yearnings and delusions that lurk amid the neon and the asphalt.

Fair Warning By Robert Olen Butler Atlantic Monthly, 225 pages, $24 What's the line from Larry McMurtry's "The Last Picture Show" about turning 40? That it's "kind of an itchy age"? Amy Dickerson, the Texas narrator-hero of Robert Olen Butler's latest novel, "Fair Warning," has recently turned 40, and she isn't just itchy, but peppery, blunt, rueful and (for strictly professional reasons) fabulously manipulative. As the star gavel-pounder of the New York auction house Nichols and Gray, Amy is the gal who broke away from home, made a career for herself and never got tied down to a man, although she's still capable of being swept off her feet and landing "up to my nostrils in my own ardor."

Love, love, love. It's in the air -- and the malls and the bookstores -- this time of year, when everyone, from candymakers to florists to lingerie purveyors to publishers, wants to cash in on Valentine's Day. You're on your own when choosing bonbons or bouquets or bustiers, but we can help you when it comes to books. Here are some to consider. Last year, the editors of the literary quarterly Glimmer Train published a fine anthology called "Mother Knows." Now, Susan Burmeister-Brown and Linda Swanson-Davies are back with "Where Love Is Found: 24 Tales of Connection" (Washington Square Press, $15)

"I told you last night that I might be gone sometime and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I'm old, and you said, I don't think you're old." --"Gilead," by Marilynne Robinson "The evening his master died he worked again well after he ended the day for the other adults, his own wife among them, and sent them back with hunger and tiredness to their cabins." --"The Known World," by Edward P. Jones "In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing."